Here's how you can identify dangerous, virus-spreading mosquitoes

More than 3,500 different species exist to bite us and suck our blood for survival. As if that weren’t enough, many also transmit debilitating — and often deadly — diseases.

We couldn’t possibly catalogue the thousands of species of mosquitoes. But here are six you need to know about — including one, Aedes vexans, that is extremely common, but (exhale!) mostly harmless and another (Anopheles) that is actually a genus (including hundreds of species):

Photo: Skye Gould/Tech Insider.

Malaria alone infected 214 million people in 2015, causing 438,000 deaths. Not one but 40 different species of mosquitoes can transmit malaria, which is actually spread by a tiny parasite that infects female mosquitoes in the Anopheles group.

Encephalitis, though rarer, is another potentially disastrous result of a mosquito bite. It’s defined as an infection of the brain. Several viruses that are transmitted by an infected mosquito can cause this disease, which often manifests as flu-like but can lead to more serious issues like seizures or paralysis.